Episode 104: African American Cinema / The Post

Deep Focus on WNHH-LP

On the first segment of today’s show, host Tom Breen is joined by New Haven film critic and lecturer Steve Fortes to talk about the history of African American cinema.

In the early 1990s, Steve taught two seminars at Yale University about the history of African American film and television. On today’s show we’ll talk with Steve about the films that he covered in those two seminars, what he saw as some of the prevailing themes and trends of in the first century of African American cinema, and about which movies and filmmakers he would include today if he were teaching the same course in 2018.

On the second segment of the show, Breen is joined by New Haven Independent staff writer Allan Appel for a review of THE POST, Steven Spielberg’s new movie about the 1971 debate within the editorial ranks of The Washington Post about whether or not to publish Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, classified documents that revealed decades of executive branch deceit and cynicism that prolonged America’s disastrous involvement in the Vietnam War. We’ll talk about how this movie resonates in 2018 as a celebration of the free press, and as an indictment of the hypermasculine industries of newspapers and politics in the early 1970s.